However, to successfully embark with a digital transformation, you must first look at the important elements to ensure you create a successful strategy.

Understanding the Customer

I have written on the topic of cloud-induced transformation of IT in the past. Adapting IT audit and monitoring processes to cloud infrastructure is one of the challenges I come across when it comes to cloud rollouts.

In a 1990s-era data center, everything revolves around hardware and virtual machines. Big, monolithic applications are installed and run on servers. Servers themselves run in the private subnet (secure) or public (DMZ), and they have various security agent software installed to monitor and log everything that goes in and out of these machines. 

Businesses need their own website to increase their online presence. Having a good and professional web hosting is necessary to have a high digital visibility. The trends in web hosting have evolved over time and now companies have many options to choose from.

With growing development, VPS servers have gained recognition. Companies and individuals are choosing virtual private servers and hosting due to the benefits it offers. Such technology has proved to be highly beneficial especially for companies. It absolutely makes sense why many organizations are shifting towards such facility. Here are five benefits listed:

High flexibility

Cavium, Inc., announced today that they are collaborating with Microsoft on evaluating and enabling a variety of cloud workloads running on Cavium’s flagship ThunderX2 ARMv8-A Data Center processor for the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

The companies are also demonstrating web services on a version of Windows Server developed for Microsoft’s internal use running cloud services workloads on ThunderX2. The server platform is based on Microsoft’s Project Olympus – Microsoft’s next generation open source hyperscale cloud hardware design.  The demonstrations will be shown at the Open Compute Project (OCP) U.S. Summit in San Jose on March 8 and 9, 2017 and are the result of an extensive long term collaboration between the two companies.

GigaTrust, a leading provider of endpoint security and document in-use protection, today announced the availability of GigaCloud, a fully-managed Software as a Service (SaaS) offering for secure endpoint document protection. GigaCloud delivers secure email and document collaboration services anytime, anywhere, on virtually any device and any platform with real-time data analytics, reporting and administrative tools.

In today’s mobile society, email and documents are the lifeblood of communication among employees, partners and customers. But, with the rapid increase in data breaches, the need for document security is paramount. According to the Ponemon Institute, the average worldwide cost of a breach is $158 per record – a 29 percent increase since 2013. Balancing the need for collaboration with enterprise security and control to protect information against breaches, non-compliance, hacks and intellectual property theft from any mobile or desktop device represents the most significant challenge for organizations of all sizes in all industries.

Organizations often struggle with piecing together disparate security solutions to protect their universe of documents, but there is a better way. GigaCloud is the first and only secure email and document protection, consumption and collaboration service backed by cloud infrastructure and a complete security ecosystem. The GigaCloud service delivers the encrypted email and document protection that organizations and government entities need; in the configuration that works best for them.

Key benefits of the GigaCloud service include:

Today, Cirba Inc. announced the general availability of cloud migration and cost analysis capabilities in Densify.com, its SaaS hybrid capacity analytics solution. Along with Expert Insight from Cirba’s Densification and Transformation Advisors, Densify.com now offers end-to-end transformation and capacity analysis for hybrid cloud environments. The analytics enable automated capacity decisions and optimization to ensure applications always have the right amount of the right kind of capacity with little or no waste. For a first-hand look at the power of Densify.com, access the free trial.

"The move to hybrid cloud for most enterprises is being slowed by complexity of making the decision as to how to balance demand across all their infrastructure options including on premise and public clouds," said Gerry Smith, CEO of Cirba. "After months of working with our partners and customers it is clear Densify.com’s SaaS analytics enable optimal decisions so that organizations may confidently transform their infrastructure."

RiverMeadow’s support for AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscriptions enables customers to sign up for an account and consume RiverMeadow Cloud Migration SaaS directly through AWS Marketplace, with integrated monthly billing based on consumption. The customer experience and workflow is designed around a native AWS customer experience from an account security, identity, and commercial perspective. In addition to consumption based billing through AWS Marketplace, customers can still procure volume subscriptions directly from RiverMeadow.

Last Tuesday, parts of the Internet came to a grinding halt when the servers that powered them suddenly vanished.  The disappearing server act came from servers that were housed as part of Amazon S3, Amazon’s popular Web hosting service.

When that incident happened, several big and popular services and Web sites were disrupted, including DraftKings, Gizmodo, IFTTT, Quora, Slack and Trello.

According to the Web site monitoring firm Apica, 54 of the largest online retailers experienced performance impairments on their Web sites, with some slowing down by more than 20 percent; 3 sites went down completely (Express, Lulu Lemon, One Kings Lane); and for effected websites, average slow down time was 29.7 seconds – 42.7 seconds to load.

What happened?

"At 9:37 a.m. PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process," Amazon said.  "Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.  The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems."

Those subsystems are important.  One of them "manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the region," according to Amazon.  And without it, services that depend on it couldn’t perform basic data retrieval and storage tasks.  The second subsystem, the placement subsystem, "manages allocation of new storage and requires the index subsystem to be functioning properly to correctly operate."  The placement subsystem is used to allocate storage for new objects.

Kinetica, provider of the fastest, in-memory database accelerated by GPUs, today announced its real-time analytics and visualization solution is immediately available on the Nimbix Cloud.  Providing instant results and visualized insights across massive streaming datasets, Kinetica on the Nimbix Cloud can be launched in seconds and is the ideal solution for GPU-accelerated analytics.

"Kinetica on the Nimbix Cloud harnesses the power of parallel GPUs to deliver real-time analytics and data written to Kinetica is automatically routed to parallel connections across the cluster," said Amit Vij, cofounder and CEO, Kinetica.  "The full Kinetica stack can be provisioned with a couple of mouse clicks from the Nimbix console or launched and automated with JARVICE’s powerful task API."